Agentic ghosting is the pattern in which a reviewer leaves a thorough review on an agent-generated pull request — explaining the issue, providing context, suggesting a direction — and the pull request then goes quiet, or the agent responds in a way that misses the point entirely and runs in circles. GitHub’s guide to reviewing agent pull requests names it as one of five red flags, and frames its cost as review time sunk into something that goes nowhere: another round invested, still nothing useful. The phrase is that post’s own label rather than a term it presents as established.
Usage
In that guide the term is deployed when triaging which agent pull requests are worth deep review. GitHub’s guide states that larger pull requests with no structured plan correlate strongly with agent abandonment or misalignment — the larger and less scoped the pull request, the more likely the review effort is wasted. Its advice is therefore to check, before investing, whether the pull request has been responsive in previous rounds and whether it has a clear implementation plan or the agent simply started writing code.
Where no plan exists, the guide advises requesting a breakdown before writing a single review comment, and supplies wording for it — asking the author to break the change into smaller scoped units or to summarize what each part does and why it is structured that way. It characterizes that response as firm, short and not personal, and as saving the reviewer an hour. The guide separately gives four conditions for sending a pull request back to be made smaller — among them a diff touching more than five unrelated files, and the agent having no implementation plan or an empty pull request body.
Related Terms
- CI Gaming — another failure mode named in the same guide
- Review Bottleneck — the scarcity of review capacity this pattern consumes
- Developer-Agent Misalignment — a related category, scoped there to cases where the developer visibly pushes back
- Human-in-the-loop — the broader set of arrangements for keeping a person involved, of which review is one